Inverness by Design

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Inverness lies about 35 miles north of San Francisco. It is tucked into a pocket of land between the Point Reyes National Seashore and Tomales Bay. The core village consists of two small valleys and a mesa separating those valleys. It has long been a summer place. A century ago, Inverness was to Berkeley what Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island was to Cambridge, or what Wellfleet on the Outer Cape was to Greenwich Village. It was an out-of-the-way coastal retreat that, for a dozen or so weeks each summer, filled with a city’s intelligentsia.

Summers in Inverness were an extension of the simple lives these families lived in the Berkeley Hills. The parents of the summer families were immersed in a strain of an Arts and Crafts movement that blended simplicity and honesty in house design with a devotion to the outdoors. Their children returned each summer to Inverness in the decades after their parents passed from the scene, embracing the parents’ values and extending them. It is a credit to the earlier generation that Inverness took on Berkeley’s brown-shingle culture, and it is a credit to the later generation that Inverness retained that culture. Inverness’s simple wood-clad houses still exist in a setting tha t would be immediately recognizable to those who spent summers there more than a century ago.

The Berkeley–Inverness diaspora made one of the best, most intact examples of an Arts and Crafts–inspired residential area found anywhere in California. And it was summer families from Berkeley who played outsized roles in preserving for the public Inverness’s extraordinarily beautiful surroundings, albeit at a cost in terms of housing affordability.

Watercolor by Charles Hovey Pepper (n.d.) depicting Bernard Maybeck and his friend and neighbor, carpenter-builder Frank Pennell. In the painting, the two men are walking toward the construction site of the Pennell house on Buena Vista Way, which Maybeck helped design. Pepper was a New Englander, an old friend of Maybeck’s from their days together in Paris, and the father of UC Berkeley professor Stephen Pepper.

how they lived. Clients expecting to discuss the particulars of a house design were instead greeted with questions about favorite foods, poems, and garments. After assessing his clients, Maybeck ascribed an architectural period to them and then designed a house fit ted to their personalities. He was in some ways the antithesis of Frank Lloyd Wright, who complained that people did not know how to live in his houses. 31 In contrast, Maybeck said that a house should be an expression of the life and spirit that is to be lived within it. 32

The Berkeley brown-shingle houses powerfully affected those who experienced them. Writer Ursula K. Le Guin used the word “utopia” to describe her family’s 1907 Maybeck-designed house on Arch Street in the Berkeley Hills. “I grew up in a utopia—in one respect: the house I lived in. No metaphor, liter -

31 Kenneth Harvey Cardwell, interview by Paul Grunland, 2004, Berkeley Historical Society and Museum, 2011, 89.

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32 Charles Keeler, “Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic man in the 20th century,” unpublished memoir, Internet Archives Wayback Machine (accessed January 4, 2025), https://web. archive.org/web/20140512221707/http://www.oregoncoast.net/maybeckgothicman.html.

ally, physically, bodily, the house.” 33 Architect and UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design Dean William Wurster used the term “magic” when referring to the interior of a house designed by Maybeck’s contemporary and fellow architect Ernest Coxhead in 1904. 34 Wurster visited the house as an undergraduate student in 1913. He later searched for words to describe the in terior, saying the space transcended aesthetics and embodied

33 Barry Bergman, “Houses in the Hills: Berkeley’s Early Bohemian Architecture,” Cal Alumni Association, June 12, 2018, https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer2018-our-town/houses-in-hills/.

34 William W. Wurster, “A Personal View,” in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Art, Civic Center, September 16, 1949 to October 30, 1949). Wurster did not identify the architect of the house in the 1949 essay but did in a subsequent interview for the Bancroft Library. William W. Wurster, William W. Wurster: College of Environmental Design, University of California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice, interview by Suzanne Riess, 1963, University of California Oral History Center, 1964, 49.

Watercolor by Ursula K. Le Guin of her family’s house, the Schneider-Kroeber House, on Arch Street (n.d.). The house was designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1907.

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The new generation of Berkeley architecture students was starved for these ideas. Jack Kent and other students were in a state of revolt against the Beaux-Arts curriculum devised by School of Architecture director John Galen Howard and carried on by his successor, Warren Charles Perry. Even Mumford threw his weight behind Berkeley students’ demands to break from the Beaux-Arts system. 88

Kent’s generation came of age during the Depression, an experience that moved students politically to the left and caused them t o question their program of study. There was a feeling that the program was set up to please the wealthy, and that architecture instead needed to be an instrument for social change. 89 “I couldn’t work for the rich when the poor needed help,” Kent said in an interview. The Culture of Cities showed a way to combine Maybeck and Hillside Club ideas with the new generation’s social and environmental concerns. As professor

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88 Waverly Lowell, Elizabeth Byrne, and Betsy Frederick-Rothwell, Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley 1903–2003 (Berkeley College of Environmental Design, 2009), 52.

89 Lowell, et al., Design on the Edge, 51.

Carl Anthony said: “The thing that was interesting to me about Lewis Mumford was that it was the first time that somebody who seemed to know about architecture was also interested in social things.” 90 Like Catherine Bauer’s Modern Housing (1934), The Culture of Cities would become standard reading for Berkeley planning and architecture students.

Mumford emerged as the intellectual successor to Ruskin and Morris for the generation of UC Berkeley architects and planners coming of age in the mid-20th century. While the Hillside Club’s founding generation had Ruskin and Morris as their intellectual polestars, the new generation had Mumford as theirs. 91 Mumford wrote in terms that echoed earlier Maybeck and Hillside Club views about creating buildings and neighborhoods that prioritized people, enabled strong social relationships, and preserved surrounding natural environments. The c oncept was that if you could improve a person’s physical environment, you could improve their quality of life, Corwin Mocine remembered. 92

Soon, Mumford would serve as mentor and tutor to Jack Kent, Francis Violich, and other UC Berkeley architects and planners. 93 Reflecting on the origins of the Department of City and Regional Planning, Violich identified Mumford as his generation’s inspiration and mentor, and he drew a line back to the Hillside Club and the unique iden tity it helped create:

90 Carl Anthony, “Carl Anthony: The Civil Rights Movement and the Expanding Boundaries of Environmental Justice in the Bay Area, 1960–1999,” interview by Carl Wilmsen, 1999, University of California Oral History Center, 2003, 16.

91 T. J. Kent, “T. J. Kent: Professor and Political Activist: A Career in City and Regional Planning in the San Francisco Bay Area,” interview by Malca Chall, 1981 and 1982, University of California Oral History Center, 1983, 123; see also Peter Ekman, “Diagnosing Suburban Ruin: A Prehistory of Mumford’s Postwar Jeremiad,” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 2 (2016): 108 n. 42.

92 Francis Violich, “The Planning Pioneers,” Sunday San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle (February 26, 1978), 29 (quoting Mocine). At the Bay Area’s first conference on regional open space held in 1959, Dr. James G. Whitney described the connection between open space and well-being in these terms: “But a society which does not care for beauty in all its aspects and which is without a reverence for nature is spiritually undernourished.”

T. J. Kent, Jr., Open Space for the San Francisco Bay Area: Organizing to Guide Metropolitan Growth (Institute of Governmental Affairs, UC Berkeley, 1970), 7.

93 Howard Bern, Ralph Giesey, Mary Tolman Kent, and Deborah Tolman Whitney, “The Loyalty Oath at the University of California, 1949–1952,” interview by Germaine LaBerge, 1999, University of California Oral History Center, 1999, 67 (Mary Tolman Kent shared that “Lewis Mumford was [Jack’s] tutor—who he had actually gotten in touch with and asked if he could be his tutor, which he was”).

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The 1905 Arthur and Nellie French House in Inverness. The house was purchased in June 1925 by two young San Francisco widows, Ruth Currier and Maude Mott, and has remained in the same extended family for more than 100 years. Their mother, Addy Robinson, moved from Napa to Berkeley in the late 1890s so that her daughters could enter the University of California. By 1900, women comprised almost half of the student body at the university.

It is set among year-round creeks and in valleys cut deep between steep hills. Its landscape is “jungular,” and its “mood vein-like, not artery-like,” wrote the poet Robert Bly shortly after he arrived for a nine-month sabbatical in 1970. 128 Landscape artist Russell Chatham spent time in West Marin in his youth and returned to live and paint there in his later years. He remarked on the landscape’s unchanging quality:

And I can trick myself into feeling it’s still the same era because the landscape itself where I am has not changed. It’s changed everywhere else, almost, but not so much in Point Reyes or up in the neighboring ranch country. To me, it looks just like it did 50 years ago, which is a blessing for a landscape artist . 129

128 In 1970, soon after he arrived with his family for a sabbatical year in Inverness, Robert Bly wrote to fellow poet Donald Hall, “The house is fine, the climate weird, the growth jungular, the mood vein-like, not artery-like, the beaches magnificent, full of cruising sea lions.” Mark Gustafson, “A Hole In the World: Robert Bly’s Point Reyes Chronicle,” Catamaran Literary Reader 4, no. 4 (2016), 56.

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129 Jordan Rane, “Russell Chatham’s Window to the West,” Cowboys and Indians Magazine (December 6, 2017).

Longtime resident William Eastman made a similar observation about the Inverness he knew as a child in the 1920s and the one he observed when he was interviewed in 1990: “The character of Inverness has stayed the same, or come closer to staying the same, than almost any area that you can think of.” 130

THE PRICE OF NATURAL BEAUTY

To flourish, the Arts and Crafts ideal requires a measure of social and economic balance—the kind that existed among craft guild members in a medieval town or among university families in the once semi-rural hillside neighborhoods of Berkeley. It was a balance that also existed in Inverness for a time when university families could still afford summer houses there. But the Berkeley families’ tight grip on Inverness gradually began to

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A sketch of Aldersyde Cottage in Inverness by Mary Cardwell. Built in 1904, it was a simple wood-clad cottage with a fireplace in the living room, a bedroom and a sleeping loft.

design,” William Wurster wrote. 148 Outdoor living was inspired by medieval times, when the “greater part of the citizen’s active life was spent outdoors.”

In The Simple Home , Charles Keeler—an ornithologist, a charter member of the Sierra Club, and a friend and chronicler of John Muir—fastened Arts and Crafts aesthetics to Maybeck’s thoughts about hillside architecture in California’s temperate climate. His book began with a description of the “spirit of the home,” then turned to the subject of the garden. Only with the reader oriented to the garden’s proper design did he return to the house and its interior and furnishings. This garden-focused approach was a defining feature of brown-shingle architecture and a departure from the prevailing practice of planting a lawn and encircling the house with shrubs (“Very much like how parsley is placed around a roast.”). 149 Instead, the garden became part of the year-round living space, what Keeler called an outdoor sitting room. Keeler may have put words to these ideas, but they originated with his friend Bernard Maybeck. 150

148 William W. Wurster, “A Personal View,” in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Art, Civic Center, September 16, 1949 to October 30, 1949).

149 Gardner Dailey, “The Post-War House,” in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region.

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150 Asked about how Maybeck may have been influenced by Keeler’s ideas in The Simple Home, Kenneth Cardwell interrupted the interviewer mid-sentence: “[Maybeck] was not influenced by those ideas—those aren’t Keeler’s ideas as much as they are directly Maybeck’s ideas.” Kenneth Harvey Cardwell, interview by Paul Grunland, 2004, Berkeley Historical Society and Museum, 2011, 92.

of the Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library.

1910 with Mount Vision in the background bears a resemblance to Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon with Grizzly Peak in the background circa 1905.

THE YEAR-ROUND AND SUMMER FAMILIES

In Berkeley, the families of professionals and faculty were sufficiently well-to-do to have housekeepers and cooks assist them at home. Many house workers were Black women. Thelma R edd looked after the Wurster household, and Inez Benjamin looked after Bernard Maybeck late in his life. But the Berkeley families seldom brought their housekeepers when they came to Inverness for summers. Mary Tolman Kent remembered that her family’s housekeeper Ora came once or twice for an Inverness summer but stayed behind in Berkeley in the years after. She hated Inverness; what the Tolmans took for rusticity—the absence of electricity and the preparation of food on kerosene stoves—she experienced as drudgery. And Ora missed her sisters and her church. She was the only Black person for miles around when in Inverness, Mary Tolman Kent recalled. The Tolmans instead hired local workers to help with household chores.

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Inverness’s comfortably middle-class summer residents lived in First Valley, its year-round working people lived predominately in Second Valley, and its more well-to-do lived in between, on the mesa that separates the two valleys. Berkeleyan K ay Holbrook remembered when her family moved up to the mesa. One of her new neighbors commented that it was nice to have the family “up here with the nice people.” 191 Writing about Second Valley, historian Dewey Livingston jested that he had “always considered Second Valley to be the ‘working-class’ neighborhood of Inverness,” where many of the Swiss-Italian and Portuguese families lived. 192

The relationship between the university families and Inverness’s year-round working people was like the relationship at Northeast Harbor in the late 19th century between Harvard summer families and the year-rounders there. With a few exceptions, there was not a strong social connection in that era between the summer people and the permanent residents on

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of signed petitions. Barbara Eastman said of Holbrook: “She’s a pillar of the community and if she needs help, she gets it.” 253

Late in life, Holbrook wrote to physician Michael Whitt that, after her family, MALT was her greatest love. Before she passed away in 2003 at age 90, she asked that her final sip of water come from the Inverness watershed that she fought to protect against development.

Holbrook’s and other preservationists’ efforts were aided by coordinated governmental and private action. By 1971, the composition of the county Board of Supervisors had changed, with the environmentalists securing a majority. Supervisors voted 3-2 to rescind a 1967 master plan that had called for wide-scale housing development in West Marin. And in 1972, California voters approved Proposition 20, creating the California Coastal Commission. That same year, President Nixon signed the legislation tha t authorized the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, preserving 8,000 acres in the Olema Valley south of Inverness. At around the same time, Marin supervisors voted 3-2 to adopt A-60 zoning, which kept agricultural parcels from being subdivided into parcels smaller than 60 acres. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust, the first land trust of its kind in the nation, was formed in 1980. Over the years, it would acquire conservation easements on over 54,000 acres of West Marin farmland.

In Inverness, the effort to save Shell Beach from development and later create Tomales Bay State Park spanned more than a decade. It began in 1941 as a local effort by members of the Inverness Improvement Association. The effort was paused briefly after the Pearl Harbor attack and renewed in 1942 by the Marin Conservation League. In a letter to historian Jack Mason years later, Berkeley and Inverness resident Ruth Colby was quick to call out the contributions of Inverness resident Bruce Johnstone. In her memoir, Mary Tolman Kent recounted that she and her husband Jack were “among the responsible citizen activists who made it happen.” 254 Botanist Willis Linn Jepson also lent his considerable prestige to the fundraising efforts to preserve Shell Beach in 1945.

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The Crow’s Nest was demolished in 1998, and rebuilt, after new owners decided it was too fragile to be renovated.

In 1904, the Morgans moved a few hundred feet up the hill into a house probably built by Berkeley contractor Leslie Roberts. Edgemont, as it was called, is a two-story, hipped-roof, shingled house situated on a bluff overlooking Tomales Bay. The house underwent a major renovation in 1998 under the supervision of architect Thayer Hopkins, but it retained the essentials of its original shingle design.

Edgemont incorporates many elements of the Berkeley brown-shingle houses of the era. Wide double doors open to a garden area, and the interior features an open plan with a 20-foot-by-42-foot living room oriented around a fireplace with built-in seating and broad redwood beams.

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Architectural historian Lucia Howard once described Berkeley brown-shingle houses as a species of “party house” built in an era before television, when people entertained themselves. Edgemont was indeed a party house. It was described in the West Marin Star as “Mattie Morgan’s Sky Palace.” A 1914 visitor from New Hampshire wrote in her diary about how noble the house looked, with its immense piazza running the length of the living room. She shared details of interior furnishings, including woven discs for sitting, pottery, and oil paintings.

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Tomales Bay State Park in 1952, Angel Island State Park in 1954, and the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962.

Ambrose achieved recognition in the post-World War II years, serving in 1948 as president of the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. His Greenwood House in Contra Costa Coun ty was featured in a San Francisco Art Museum exhibit, Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region .

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